I need not explain how these Shadows were suggested, to any one who has seen WILKIE’S picture, “The Rabbit on the Wall.” But by what pains they were invented can never be revealed; for it is known to my tortured digits alone, and they, luckily for me, are dumb. I calculate that I […]
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На улицах рыжий туман. Падает рыжий снег. Никогда, никогда нет солнца.
Mother Maria Skobtsova
Novelists for many years now have delighted in wry and slightly bitter portraits of television hosts, movie executives, and the similarly shallow. This is because they despise facile shallowness and inauthenticity, and by wittily and insightfully depicting it may they best reveal and reinforce their own authenticity. This, of course, is something of a joke, as the act of writing a novel to underscore your own realness and integrity is a profoundly vain and shallow act. The truly authentic simply live out their authenticity, they do not write about it. Your humble author, of course, is a singular exception to this rule.
Matteo Sepulvicci, A Whore’s Apartment in Babylon
I did it, and I didn’t know why; certainly, it was the stupidest thing I had ever doneI knew this even then, as I went through with the act. I didn’t know why, but I do now. I needed a sin; my father, God, the StateI loved them all, I burned for their touch on my shoulders. I loved them and I needed to create for myself a guilt worthy of them.
I do not think, in fact, that it is so much as you might think, that I was the spoiled child, that I felt unnoticed or unloved. I could say that it was; indeed I have said as such, to myself and I have lied as well to many, even as I played at confession. But I did the thing in private; I made sure no one would ever know, but me; and by that same token I made sure that my sin sat always on my shoulders. I feared most of all absolution.
Josef Cecis?iu, On Banks of Rivers
A slightly unusual appeal for electronic civil rights, via my good buddy Wade, over at God-Damned Christian:
No mark of the beast for me you Luciferian beehivers. You can take all those RFID chips wrapped like a burrito in the HR 4(6+6+6) national id bill and stick it up yor own arse!
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Dave is a sad old Indian, nearly the last of his tribe. He sits and rolls a cigarette as we wait for the train.
“Train’s coming,” I say, trying to be helpful.
“I know,” he says, “I see it. But there is nothing I can do but sit here an roll my cigarette.”
“You could not roll it; save it for later.”
He looks at me with sad, old eyes, and then goes back to his cigarette. “You are a fool, and soon you will be dead.”
Melancholy, I think, is the perfect word to describe Dave the Indian.
—Stewart Finley,
Wet-Footed Among the Americans
Thursday, September 22, 2005
For twenty-five years or more, I have kept my eye on this little word ‘people,’ and I have yet to find a single American or English author who does not misuse it…. You are not obliged to do anything of the kind, and never will be, unless all good writers agree upon it, and then — for that is the way language is made — it will be proper to do so.
